The wrong ‘bold’ promises will only hurt Labour

In the inward-looking debate that followed Labour’s defeat in 2010, one argument was especially dangerous: that it would have been better for Labour if John Smith had lived and won a smaller majority on a more left-wing platform in 1997.

It was expressed in its purest form by Neal Lawson, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, who said that when Tony Blair won a landslide, “the wrong people were voting Labour”. This meant, he said, that the New Labour government was too afraid of offending the rich people who voted for it, and therefore it made “no real change in the Thatcherite weather”.

There is a similar debate raging in Labour circles now: that Keir Starmer needs to make “bolder” promises, even at the cost of putting off a few potential voters, in order to win a mandate for “radical” change. Otherwise, the argument runs, Labour risks being just a continuation of the Conservative government with different faces.

It is the same argument that lies behind many of the different disputes over Labour policy. It was particularly sharp over Starmer’s refusal to promise to lift the two-child limit on welfare benefits. What is the point of a Labour government, critics asked, if all it offered on child poverty was a “cross-departmental cabinet committee”? There was a reflex whiplash of it when Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, this week said that a Labour government wouldn’t dispense with barges for housing asylum-seekers straight away.

It also lies behind the disquiet over Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, ditching (sorry, I mean postponing) the £28bn-a-year green investment programme. And there is a flicker of it about the less well-reported tensions over deputy leader Angela Rayner’s employment rights policy.

Usually, the argument is not explicit. Starmer’s critics tend not to say it would be better for Labour to win fewer votes in return for a more “socialist” manifesto. Indeed, they pretend that bolder policies would win more votes, which is why Lawson, chair of the Compass think-tank, performed such a public service in clarifying what is really at stake.

What people really mean when they say that Starmer should be bolder, more radical or “go big” is that a 20-point lead in the opinion polls gives him scope to calibrate the balance between the size of his majority and the ambition of his manifesto. This is the same fallacy that inspires John Smith nostalgia: the belief that Blair overdid the reassurance of Tory middle England. It is dangerous because it is only possible to make the case in hindsight. After the 1997 election, it seemed likely that Labour would have won comfortably even if it hadn’t made the compromises that Blair asked it to.

But it wasn’t obvious beforehand. One of the keys to understanding the 1997 election is that the opinion polls had been wrong at the previous election, and so nobody in the Labour Party took victory for granted. It was only afterward that the “if only” school of thought took hold — mostly some time afterwards, when disappointment with Blair’s foreign policy grew.

“If only” Smith had lived, it was said, we would never have joined the US in invading Iraq. Well, who can say? And who can say that Smith would have won a second term and still been in government by then? Blair’s view was always that what he called “plain Labour” could win once, but it needed a thoroughly modernised Labour Party to win and to keep on winning.

All of which is an interesting academic debate about the New Labour period, but it is reckless to engage in such theoretics before an election now. Starmer is right to take no chances, and to treat a 20-point lead in the polls as a snare and a delusion. He will no doubt be circulating to all members of the shadow cabinet the analysis of postwar opinion polls by Ben Walker of the New Statesman, which showed that Harold Wilson’s government nearly overcame an even bigger deficit in public opinion this far out from the 1970 election.

Starmer’s ruthless focus on reassuring Tory middle England can often seem frustratingly uninspiring. Blair was able to overcome that problem by being young and charismatic, at a time when the state of the economy allowed optimism. Starmer has none of those advantages, but the approach remains correct.

The Labour leader is right to ignore the siren voices of the Trades Union Congress, calling yesterday for a wealth tax on the richest 0.3 per cent of the population. It is only 0.3 per cent, says the TUC, calling its proposal “modest”. But John Smith thought the same about his plan to raise taxes on the top five per cent of incomes in 1992. The problem then and now is that such policies are seen as confiscatory rather than compensatory, and they narrow Labour’s appeal rather than broaden it.

The weakness of John Smith’s approach to politics was that he appeared to believe in the pendulum theory. “He didn’t believe you had to go out to win,” one of the leading Blairite ministers of the period told me. “If you just happened to occupy the post of leader of the Labour Party, your turn would come.”

The TUC is making the same mistake, imagining that Starmer’s turn has come, and all it has to do is to load him up with its favoured policies to see them delivered in government. But what it is really saying is that it thinks a 20-point opinion poll lead is big enough to allow it to take the risk of driving some voters away. If it were more honest, it would fall back on Neal Lawson’s argument, that these are people that Labour doesn’t want to have voting for the party anyway. That is not an argument that anyone should expect Starmer to take seriously.